I don't know - its very easy to buy what looks like the same jar and find it has less. The consumer should not be expected to be some fucking food detective, constantly working to make sure that they aren't being ripped off. Packaging should be simple enough that the volume presented to the purchaser is the actual volume.
Literally no reason to allow companies to use misleading package sizes or to expect customers to check the unit price every time they walk into the grocery store. Its great the unit prices are there, but misleading packaging still sucks.
If bothers me if he spends that money exerting an outsized influence on my political institutions, though. Wealth inequality isn't really about wealth so much as power. I really don't care if Musk or anyone else lives more comfortably than me, but I do care if they have more than one figurative vote in how my society functions.
When is having an outsized influence allowed? Someone who pickets for a candidate will have an outsized influence; so will celebrities with many followers, etc.
You can't solve every problem, but that isn't an excuse to solve no problems. If you can buy an entire platform that functions more like public service or utility than a company and modify its political alignment, you have too much power.
Hunger and struggling to pay one's bills -- those cause despair. Envy surely does not (and should not). And anyways the claim that relative wealth inequality (as opposed to actual poverty) causes despair is an extraordinary claim and it requires that you present extraordinary evidence.
I've been working on binding raylib to s7 scheme and implementing a kanren on top of it basically just for the sake of understanding. I let AI write most of the binding code, though, because that is conceptually simple but very boring.
The problem with a religion where all it takes is one weird ritual to remain blameless in the eyes of God forever is that it's easy to let a lot of shit slide. Christians always say "we're not perfect, we're just forgiven."
So even though that is Christianity's message, Christianity's metagame means if you take it seriously, you don't actually have to put in the work. You're still going to Heaven because grace is through faith and not works.
You've been dealing with the wrong folks then because all Christians should believe what James says when we says
James 2:14-20, 26 (NET) What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Can this kind of faith save him?
If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacks daily food,
and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, keep warm and eat well,” but you do not give them what the body needs, what good is it?
So also faith, if it does not have works, is dead being by itself.
But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith without works and I will show you faith by my works.
You believe that God is one; well and good. Even the demons believe that – and tremble with fear.
But would you like evidence, you empty fellow, that faith without works is useless?
For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.
I think this is the point being made: your 'should', and by extension your quote, has no meaning when grace is defined as the single goal of spiritual life, and then is reduced to a simple transaction.
Sure, people are free to believe whatever. I am quoting the very scripture they claim to believe though and so it would be hypocritical to do otherwise
The term we have for those folks is that they're doing "easy-believism" and it's broadly a pitfall within Christianity. It's not considered normative to so heavily lean on grace in the way that you're describing
Interestingly, the New Testament forewarns that the church will attract all kinds of sinful people, too: hypocrites, Pharisees, abusers, false prophets, false teachers, “wolves”, and those of dead faith as you mention. Jesus and the apostles consistently assume corruption, misuse of authority, and false prophets will exist.
This is further reflected in the biblical distinction between the visible and invisible church and Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares: genuine followers and the others grow together until the final judgment.
So, many people know that only a small minority of “Christians” are actually faithful followers of Jesus (i.e. regularly read Scripture and live in obedience to it). And, some estimates place this number as low as 1%.
I'll bite. I think there is a difference between "should they" and "should they be able to."
Most liberals I know think they shouldn't but that its stupid to police this aspect of people's behavior if they are on EBT. Most liberals might even feel more comfortable regulating everyone's behavior by taxing unhealthy foods than they would just bothering poor people with it.
EBT is already money with strings attached - you can only spend it on food. I don't see narrowing the definition of "food" here to exclude soda to be a huge problem.
I don't really see the point, as a practical matter. Money being the fungible thing that it is, the only way this policy actually restricts anything is if the only money SNAP recipients ever spend on food is their SNAP benefit.
It feels much more like spite politics: We can tell these people whose morals are so bad that they need our money to survive that they cannot spend it on what we think of as junk food. That is a luxury only us hard working folk are permitted. When you are poor, you cannot suffer alone, you need to know that we are making sure you feel extra pain. Please be motivated to be better.
Given that money is fungible, SNAP could in theory be replaced by a direct cash payment with no strings attached. This would also have the benefit of reducing overhead costs.
No argument from me. Anything we can do to reduce unnecessary overhead and either save the money or (better) use it to improve outcomes would be welcome.
Since it has no calories, it's not "food" by even a very loose definition.
As someone who lives in a neighborhood where most tapwater is still delivered by lead service lines, I'm sympathetic to the argument that it provides hydration. I'd prefer that my tax dollars went to solving that problem more directly, however.
I think it could be argued either way. There's plenty of non-food necessities (toilet paper, feminine hygiene products, etc.) that aren't covered by SNAP.
If we want healthy food we have to regulate the food-makers. Everything else is skirting the edges of the problem. Taxes, EBT restrictions, none of that will make a dent.
Taxes like that seem all but required if you want to have a chance at a functioning single payer system. 0 chance single-payer will works with so much freedom to destroy yourself then make everyone pay for it.
I don't see why this would be the case - it's not like the private system in the US today has different premiums based on how much junk food you eat (the closest to that I've seen is higher premiums for tobacco users).
Because some people might have 10 different things they're doing in any given day and sometimes their ADHD distracts them from one thing to the other and you don't want to lose all that context.
The article does actually explicitly address this as well.
>I do this because I have ADHD and I'm a visual thinker. if I don't see something, I forget it exists. So I keep tabs open, group them by project, save things to read later. Before I know it, I have another browser window with multiple tabs sprawling across my screen.
Which mirrors my experience. My brain can obsess over things all it wants but if I don't see that set of tabs open roughly in the same order as I had them then I am promptly forgetting about that. I've gone through setting things up before only to realize a week before I had done the same thing in a different spot that I didn't name very well.
I guess, but the real issue here is that capital will mount a concerted, decades long effort, to prevent global organization of labor. Its not like its per se impossible to get enough global labor organization: its just profoundly, aggressively, even murderously, opposed by people who have power.
I guess we could think of that as just "part of the reality," but I think its a little silly not to at least mention it.
It is not realistic but even worse it isnt even desirable.
There is huge swaths of opposition to "global organization of labor". The last thing you want is to oppress a bunch of people under your vision of perfect government.
It's horses for courses, right? Pick the right language for the job. LISP was designed for 60's era GOFAI, designed for that with code not differentiated from data, but a COBOL or FORTRAN even BASIC programmer would presumably (and justifiably from the perspective of those typical use cases) regard LISP as the toy/unserious language.
As I get older, I realize that everybody's sweet spot is a little different.
Lisp and APL both have their adherents.
I personally find a bit more syntax than lisp to be nice. Occasionally I long for the homoiconicity of lisp; otoh, many of the arguments for it fall flat with me. For example, DSLs -- yeah, no, it's hard enough to get semi-technical people to use DSLs to start with, never mind lisp-like ones.
I'm an academic and its difficult for me to imagine what the fuck deans do that is worth ~3-4 times as much as the people actually teaching and doing research. Fire them into outer space, I say.
> I'm an academic and its difficult for me to imagine what the fuck deans do that is worth ~3-4 times as much as the people actually teaching and doing research. Fire them into outer space, I say.
I'm also an academic. To me, the primary role of a dean is to insulate me as much as possible from upper admin. I've had deans who are good at this job, and those who either aren't good at it, or think that their job is something else. The ones who are good at what I think their job is ... I'm not sure I'd want to see them get 3–4x my pay, but I'm definitely willing to pay a premium to have someone else deal with upper admin.
So it’s a management layer created to help protect people who actually provide value from the OTHER management layer. Sounds like a made up problem to me, and also an example of what everyone complains about when it comes to higher education: too much admin pushing costs higher.
I mean this is an issue in private industry as far as I've seen as well. as a company grows layers of middle management are added to translate and implement policies from other management layers
My relative is an administrator. One of the things he does is to manually process the flood of requests to override this or that policy because the system for enforcing the complex course selection and graduation requirements (e.g., prerequisites etc) doesn't work perfectly. The other is to adjust those requirements on a real time basis to comply with this or that complex, contradictory, and unclear mandates handed down from above (such as getting rid of all traces of wokeness).
Pay him his professor salary, and he'd never have stepped up to the role.
"All complex systems operate in failure mode 100% of the time." What this means is that systems operate with some of their automatic controls bypassed, and with those processes being carried out manually. The Gimli Glider took off with two broken fuel gauges.
My thought about bureaucracy is that you can automate complex human processes only to a certain point, and then the system needs some manual override capability, and possibly human interfaces, to work. This is what bureaucrats do. The reason why its seems chaotic and inefficient is that the easy stuff has been automated away, leaving only the hard stuff.
I can't vouch for every bureaucratic process, and bureaucrat, being optimally efficient or necessary. But in the past few months, I've observed the hard lesson of what happens when you think you can deal with bureaucracies that you think are wasteful by taking a chainsaw to them. I don't believe in that approach any more, even for dealing with systems that I hate.
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